by Jean Stein
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WALTER HOPPS: An awful lot of Jane’s regular behavior was childlike. It wasn’t like baby goo goo, but a mix of impulsiveness and innocence the way a nine-year-old would be. I can’t quite imitate her speech. Sort of stream of consciousness coming off from somewhere, but then she’d slip into these moments of shrewd clarity and would seem normal and just clear as can be.
Jane would go in and out of it. Sometimes we’d draw together, just to get her involved with something so she wasn’t sitting there on the sofa rocking, so out of it. There were times when she’d go into an almost autistic kind of world, but drawing would get her going. We’d do crazy drawings together. I’d say, “Let’s do monsters” or whatever, you know, it was all like childlike drawing. What I was doing with her was turning the art into something really creepy. That was the exercise. I was interested to see, if she were to draw demons, what would they look like? Mostly, she just did numbers. She would do strange arithmetic or crazy number sequences, just repeating them over and over. Occasionally—oh god, this is sad—occasionally she’d do what looked like a childish drawing of a woman lying down dead, murdered. She’d grab these drawings and hide them in the vases around the place. I think I saved one somewhere. She grabbed some of mine one time while I was dutifully trying to draw monsters and hid them without my knowing it. Ed Moses found a stash of them one day and said, “Can you believe what she’s done here? Look at this!” and “Boy, those are terrible, weird-looking things!” Actually I never confessed to him that they were mine. I turned in some of her drawings to the psychiatrists, who wanted to see what she was doing. Mostly it was just sad, it was as though she were somewhere locked away, way inside and not too much could get out.
Occasionally Ed and I would watch television with her. She enjoyed Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show and things like that. Sometimes she’d play records and we had to dance with her. Dancing for her could be anything from just standing in one place twirling around and around, or doing bizarre versions of the twist, or stomping around the room like a robot. Whatever struck her fancy, you know? If you had a certain imagination, you could sort of get into it. Okay. So, around the house it was drawing, dancing, listening to music, watching television. We’d also try to get her to sit out on the beach and take a little sun because she looked very pasty. We were not to go into the ocean because none of us were up to handling that if she got in trouble out there. I don’t think she wanted to go in. I think the sea scared her. She’d wade in the waves but mostly we’d just spread out a blanket and lie on the sand fully dressed, have snacks or something.
Ed and I and one of the other guys, I can’t remember who, took her to Disneyland. Moses had brought some grass along, and he and I were smoking it. It’s the only time I’d been there, and I don’t ever need to go to Disneyland ever again—I’ll tell you, for me it was the way to see it. To experience it stoned, in the company of a charming, totally delighted schizophrenic girl—that’s the only way to see Disneyland. The whole thing delighted Jane: the people, being out, the cartoon characters walking around so you could meet Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy, and they had all these strange rides and places to go to. In her childlike way, she enjoyed it—I don’t recall now what rides she liked, but I remember what frightened her. There was a sizable room that was dark and shaped like a hexagon. It had a very sophisticated projection outfit so that we’d sit on benches in the middle of the room while six different movies were projected up on the wall playing simultaneously, so you had a Charlie Chaplin here, W. C. Fields there, whatever, and you could just look around. Of course I loved that fantastic montage. To me that was the most interesting thing in the whole place. It was just nuts to have them all going at once on big screens. I couldn’t stay as long as I wanted to, because being there in the dark room with all this stuff going on was obviously upsetting to Jane. She kept standing up, and she’d go, “Did you hear me stomping my feet?”
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CRAIG KAUFFMAN: The three of us took her to Disneyland. And I think there’s some photographs of us all there in jail. You know one of those jail photographs. And we were all just plastered on martinis, going on these rides and stuff. But I, I really couldn’t take it, because it was—it would be so depressing at times. You know, she’d tear her dress and run into the crowd and stuff. But she loved Walter, and she loved Ed. Walter was like her father, and Ed was like her date. And when she’d go out with me, she always told everybody she was taking care of me. I was kind of nuts in those days. You know, I really liked her. But you know, you’d be driving along, she’d light up a cigarette and turn up an Elvis tune. Blast it all the way up on the radio, right? I mean, oh boy, I embarrass easily. It didn’t seem to bother Walter very much. I don’t know where those photos are now. I’d love to have one. Maybe Ed Moses has ’em.
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ED MOSES: A couple of months after I started the job I picked Jane up and she didn’t have any shoes on, so I took her to a shoe store down at the Third Street mall in Santa Monica. Salesmen walked up to her at first just like she was a normal person and then they’d have to sort of step back to reorient themselves. I’d help them along as much as I could by talking to Jane in a fashion to obliquely convey that we’re dealing with a mental patient here. They didn’t always get it at first, so you’d have to make repeated efforts and little by little they’d settle into it. Since Jane never wore underpants, she’d be sitting there with her legs apart and the guy would be down there and she’d go back and forth with her feet. There was some energy that she had to diffuse somehow, so she made these strange motions. I saw these little boots and pointed them out to her. She just sort of nodded her head and twisted around. I thought they were nice little boots. They were very soft and they were sort of plum red. They came up just above her ankles in a sort of scallop and made her look like a little elf. She could have worn one of those hats with a feather through it and she would have been like Robin Hood. I don’t know why I wanted to make her into Robin Hood—that’s too perverse a thought. In hindsight I don’t know why I got those boots for her, I just thought it was a cute idea—I thought it might brighten her up a little bit. Whenever I was at her home she’d always have them on. She’d wear those fucking red boots to bed. She wore those things until they were falling off her feet—’cause I bought them for her. It’s excruciating when you get to know someone whose behavior from the outside just seems goofy, but after a while you can feel what’s twisting and turning inside.
Jane was never a danger to you, only to herself. And there was danger. The scary part was that she would come creeping in in the middle of the night. I slept very lightly. At the stir of a mouse I’d wake up—because of her. I was up in this little room way up at the top and her bedroom was down below. But she’d wander up in the middle of the night and stand over me—shuffling from one foot to the other. She’d be wearing a nightgown or something like that. She wasn’t naked. I don’t think she was proud of her body so she wasn’t exposing herself. I’d realize this presence and I’d look up and she’d be looking down at me. I’d say, “Oh, hi, Jane. Are you just looking for something to eat? A drink of water? Or can I direct you back to your sleeping quarters?”
Jane had stepped out of the territory where most of us travel. She spoke in tongues: it was a jumble of irrational connections of words and images, but after a while you understood. It was like listening to someone speaking Spanish and every once in a while a word comes out and you say, “Oh yeah.” She reminded me of the sculptor John Chamberlain who liked the sounds and the look of words but doesn’t care about the meaning of them. It was something like that—like words put together for how they sound together but they might have been in her imagination. Every once in a while she’d say these incredibly succinct things that cut right through everything, and the rest of the time there was this talking in tongues, this weird kind of chattering and clattering about. There were certain things she’d say when things had gotten out of hand and she was about to become
dangerous. One of her famous phrases was, “There is a rat in the refrigerator.” That meant some bad shit was about to happen, some real bad shit. I don’t know if there ever actually was a rat that she’d found and put in the refrigerator or what, but she’d say that phrase and I’d think, Holy shit, what’s going to come down now?
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WALTER HOPPS: I was trying to go to school, so I would mostly do weekends and the graveyard shift at the Garland house. I’d come in at ten or eleven o’clock at night. That’s what I did later when I worked at the UCLA medical unit, too. Oh, it was just hell, that’s how you get addicted to speed because you gotta be at work at eleven o’clock at night and stay awake until seven in the morning. That was a real grind sometimes when you’re there on a night run and you get off and you’re heading right to school. I could fall asleep at the Garland house, but Jesus, she’d get up and roam the house at night. I’d be lying there having drifted off, but I’m not undressed and under the covers, right? You got your slacks on, the shoes handy, the shirt on, and you’re ready to go. But then suddenly you open your eyes and her face is five inches from yours, staring at you, and then you have to get her back to bed.
Early one morning when I was sure Jane was still asleep, I took Grace Garland’s new Edsel sedan out on PCH just to work off some tension and I ran the son of a bitch up as far as the speedometer would go, to where it says 120. I made sure the tires were good, which they were. I always made sure everything was shipshape on the car at the first gas station I’d get to, because you didn’t want anything to go wrong when you were out with Jane.
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ED MOSES: I had been going on these visits to the Garlands maybe two days a week for maybe three months when they decided that I was so successful that they wanted to increase it to three or four days a week. They were looking for another person, so I mentioned Craig Kauffman and another guy, Allen Lynch. The two of them had started hinting around that they wouldn’t mind having a gig like mine; they liked that kind of bread. I asked them to apply. Craig lasted two visits, Allen lasted one. Jane threw Allen out right away after one meeting. She just didn’t like him. Same thing with Craig. Craig actually took her out two or three times. He was game because he was always interested in a few extra bucks. But Jane said, “Craig is crazier than I am.” And in a sense it’s true. But he wasn’t that kind of crazy.
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CRAIG KAUFFMAN: Jane was a funny deal. We were really poor for a long time. I mean, we got money from our parents. But, to do anything else, we needed a little extra. So when we were still in college, Jim Newman got Ed Moses and me involved in this thing with Jane. And we would be on for—I don’t know, twelve hours and then off, and then on for twelve hours. And I didn’t last very long. ’Cause it was hard. She was a young woman and kind of attractive and she’d flirt with everybody around when I took her out, particularly with motorcycle guys. She would always dress up in these designer dresses that her mother got for her. Her mother had been a beauty queen when she was younger and married to some movie mogul at one point. And her mother was like this fading beauty, you know? One time I went over there, there were some old silent movie stars, and they were all playing bridge. It was creepy. Really creepy. Yeah, I think I actually went down there one night when Buster Keaton was over playing bridge or something.
I’d go down to the big house on the beach in Malibu and pick Jane up and take her out. We would go to all these restaurants for lunch and have all this food and martinis and stuff. And she would get kind of plastered and maybe do a cartwheel down the aisle. She’d pull tricks. Like, she’d break things and stuff. I never saw it really bad. But Ed and Walter did. And she would say, “There’s mice in the icebox! There’s mice in the icebox!” And then you knew that something bad was gonna happen. I didn’t last very long. It was depressing for me, you know?
Credit 3.3
Craig Kauffman, 1958.
But Ed and Walter seemed to handle it pretty well. Walter was like the doctor. Walter was sort of always very analytical. You know? He told me one story that when he was making it with some girl, he was experimenting with himself. So he took his pulse. While he was doing it. I don’t know whether that was a true story, but he told me that. You know what I mean, that aspect of Walter. That control, and analytical quality, slightly Zen-like.
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ED MOSES: Walter could not take too much stress at all. He would just turn and go the other way or he’d go up to his room. Craig and I went to pick Walter up at his home for lunch or breakfast one day. He had this little trunk in his room and he pulled out his shoes and there was this box of announcements for an exhibition that Craig and Wallace Berman had made—the announcements were about four or five inches high and about three and a half inches wide, with the picture of a beautiful little book printed on them. Walter was supposed to have mailed them, but he never did. Craig grabbed him by the throat and was going to throttle him. They’d spent about a week hand pressing all these things, and Walter just couldn’t get it together.
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WALTER HOPPS: I was very fond of Jane. Somewhere inside there was a really nice person and somebody who’d been very attractive once. I think Ed was fond of her, too, in a way, and he held up all right. But Ed was always interested in the dark stories. He lied about his age to enlist in the navy, you know. He even won a medal: he was on some beachhead in the South Pacific, where they went up the beach on those landing crafts, and the Japanese were just shooting everybody to ribbons. Ed came upon a doctor and saw him dead, and he was next to a guy whose lower body had been torn open. The intestines were all lying out and Ed was desperately trying to stick ’em back in and put the guy back together. Of course you get shell-shocked when everyone else is getting shot to pieces and you aren’t—it’s very hard on the psyche. You wonder why you haven’t been killed. Ed just kind of went crazy—maybe he was hurt a little—and he was evacuated out with the wounded. So Ed woke up in the hospital in San Diego eventually with extreme trauma. But he survived.
Ed spent more time on the Garland case than I did and he managed to burrow out stories. We all just thought the mother was dreadful. When she had taken off in the past, she’d left Jane in the care of some kind of caretaker, and one of them turned out to be vicious. And that’s part of why I think the doctors told us that she had a very difficult time relating to women. This was all before our time, before we were onstage—Jane never mentioned the woman to me. Somehow Ed had ferreted out the information, and I’m sure it’s true.
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ED MOSES: For a while I didn’t know what Jane’s game was. She was so smart the way she played with you. Really smart, but really angry. She always made funny comments, but they were so oblique. It wasn’t until I got to know her over a period of time that I could play back and forth with her. I couldn’t figure out if her insanity was some genuine insanity that came about from a heavy-duty life situation, or if there was some genetic factor that had induced this schizophrenic behavior. Was she really blocked up and inside out, or had she gone through some heavy shit and had a low threshold for the shit? Or maybe the shit was so high that no matter what your threshold was you might have flipped out. I remember when I was in the service there were guys who couldn’t take as much stress as other guys. Shell shock. She didn’t seem like a straight schizophrenic to me. She was like this creature who had been mortally hurt. I heard one story that made me wonder.
The mother wasn’t in Jane’s life for a while. Jane must have demanded some independence. Grace Garland left her alone at the ranch with this gal named Helen who was a horse trainer who had come to watch over Jane and the horses while Jane’s mother was off leading her own life. Grace Garland still had money, was socializing with her friends, showing off her diamonds, all that kind of stuff. She just parked Jane up in the mountains and then this caretaker and Jane took up together.
The woman had really taken her over and was trying to get papers signed over to her, bonds and stuff in her name, but Jane wasn
’t coughing up or doing what she was supposed to, so this woman just raised hell. This lesbian horse trainer took to tying Jane up and beating her. Then she set the horse barn on fire. It was really sort of a holocaust with the horses. She either burned Jane or did some really horrendous thing, and the mother found out about it. The woman got thrown out, and she tried to sue, and Jane’s mother tried to have her thrown in jail. This is conjecture because I heard only little bits and pieces, but I never really put it all together. Jane’s mother talked to me about it a little bit from time to time because she wanted to get my confidence. Jane would talk about it, too, in her garble, and I also got some of it out of the shrink who followed Judd Marmor.
“In the Matter of the Estate and Guardianship of Jane Mary Garland, Minor,” Superior Court of California, September 8, 1952.
FROM “PETITION FOR THE APPOINTMENT OF GUARDIAN OF THE PERSON AND GUARDIAN OF THE ESTATE AND FOR ORDER OF SUPPORT,” SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, JUNE 18, 1954:
GRACE GARLAND represents as follows:
Jane Mary Garland is incompetent by reason of the fact that she is presently suffering from a schizophrenic reaction–mixed type, and is unable, unassisted, properly to manage and take care of her property or herself, and by reason thereof is likely to be deceived and imposed upon by artful and designing persons, and that it is necessary that a guardian of her person and estate be appointed.
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ED MOSES: I know there was a lot of bad feeling and a lot of shit going on but I never paid much attention. You’d think now looking back, Why didn’t you pay more attention, Ed? I just didn’t want to think about it, I guess. Oh, those things were so horrific when they happened, and here was Jane totally short-circuited after that. That’s when she was brought into the hospital at UCLA. She never could get back to herself—not while I was there. The mother hated this woman. According to her, Jane was fine before. But she would have said that because she wouldn’t admit to anything that might indicate some kind of underlying disturbance. She blamed it all on this other woman—she thought that this woman had driven Jane nuts. We all have a potential to snap, we just have to give it enough juice. It’s about overload, and different people have different overload sequences. Who knows? Maybe Jane was a regular kid once.
